Bracken, Brendan, Sir

Born: 1901 AD
Died: 1958 AD

Nationality: echo $strNat;?>
Categories: echo $strCat;?>

1901 – Born on the 15th of February in Ireland. He was an Irish-born British Conservative cabinet minister.

1920 – When Bracken arrived in Britain in 1920 he claimed alternately to be either Australian who had lost his parents in a bush fire, or a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, which was also untrue.

1923 – A supporter of Sir Winston Churchill.

1929 – After Sedbergh, Bracken had a successful career as a publisher and newspaper editor in London before being elected to the House of Commons.

1941-1945 – Bracken served as Minister of Information after a short stint as Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary.

1945 – Bracken was briefly made First Lord of the Admiralty but lost the post in the fall of the Churchill government to Clement Atlee’s Labour Party.

– He himself lost his North Paddington seat but returned as MP for Bournemouth in a November by-election.

– He is said to be the model for the brash Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

– His most famous business achievement was in merging the Financial News into the Financial Times.

1952 – He was elevated to the House of Lords by Churchill, as Viscount Bracken of Christchurch in the County of Southampton.

1958 – He died of oesophagal cancer on the 8th of August, aged only 57, six years after his elevation to the House of Lords.